I’ve never been a gigantic Zappa fan, but a
couple of years ago I was at a community yard sale where there was a guy
selling records and music memorabilia – posters, sheet music, etc.The interesting thing was that it was almost all Zappa related.In spite of my limited Zappa interests I remember buying quite a bit
of stuff from this guy, including this weird Zappa related ‘various
artists’ compilation (wish I’d purchased some of the posters and other
stuff).Apparently released as part of Warner Brother’s ‘loss
leaders’ program which offered a series of ‘artist introductory’ LPs
to the buying public at heavily discounted prices, 1969’s "Zapped”
was clearly meant to showcase Zappa’s work as a talent
scout/producer/writer.Pulling
together 13 tracks from Zappa’s Straight/Bizarre catalog the liner notes
mentioned the track listing included material from every Straight/Bizarre
album up through 1970, save The Mothers of Invention’s “Uncle Meat”
and Lenny Bruce’s “The Berkeley Concert”.(Most folks will probably be able to survive the omissions.)The emphasis was clearly on the weird, ranging from the mildly
strange (Jeff Simmons’ R&B-flavored ‘Lucille Has Messed My Mind
Up’), to the truly bizarre – Captain Befheart’s ‘The Blimp/Mousetrapreplica’
and Lord Buckley’s ‘Governor Slugwell’ – anyone got a clue what
either of those was about?).While
I’ll readily admit that I enjoy an occasional brush with the strange,
quite a bit of the collection was outright tasteless.Zappa’s decision to record Wild Man Fischer always struck me as
thorough exploitation.Certainly
nothing here was remotely commercial and to be honest, much of it wasn’t
even entertaining in a weird fashion.Were
there any musical highlights?Well
it depended on your definition of a highlight, but the tracks most likely to
attract your attention included Judy Henske and Jerry Yester’s ‘St.
Nicholas Hall’ (which at least boasted a recognizable
harpsichord-propelled melody, Tim Dawe’s oddly upbeat
synthesizer-driven ‘Little Boy Blue’ and Zappa’s own blazing ‘Willie
the Pimp’ (Captain Beefheart unique vocal stylings kicking it along).If nothing else, the set served as a nice primer with respect to what
you should expect from some of Zappa’s signings to Bizarre and Straight.Since many of those LPs go for a pretty penny, depending on your
tastes and reactions to these samples, you might want to think once or twice
about making some of those purchases.